Microsoft has announced that its latest update to Internet Explorer 7 removes …

Internet Explorer 7 was a long time coming, and with the rise in popularity of Firefox, expectations were high. One thing that most users didn't expect, however, was an additional Windows Genuine Advantage check, baked into every copy of the installation routine for IE7. Now, according to a post on Microsoft's IE blog, this WGA check is going away with the latest IE7 update, at least for Windows XP users.

The inclusion of a separate WGA check for IE7 was always a bit odd. Windows XP SP2 comes with a WGA check that it uses for, among other things, allowing access to Microsoft's Windows Update web site (critical updates are unaffected). As such, the only people who would typically be foiled by IE7's built-in WGA would be pirates who have already cracked Windows activation and Windows' own WGA. One imagines that, rather than searching for a "cracked" version of IE7, most of these people would simply download a free browser such as Firefox. On the blog, Microsoft claims that it "takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously" and that's why WGA is being removed.

The move is remarkable because it is the first time that Microsoft has removed WGA checks from a product in order to increase the attractiveness of that product. It's difficult to see this as any but an attempt to get as many users as possible to install IE7, even those who have pirated Windows.

This doesn't answer the question of why Microsoft would have bothered with the extra WGA check to begin with. The plan, like the much-maligned Vista Ultimate Extras, was to provide a kind of reward for people running non-pirated versions of Windows, using IE7 as a carrot to entice people into the lovely land of legitimacy. However, this plan seems opposed to the whole purpose of releasing a free web browser in the first place, which is to maximize market share. Firefox continues to gain market share at the expense of IE6, with anywhere between 13 and 16 percent depending on which web statistics aggregator site you look at.

More worrying for Microsoft is the fact that IE7's share appears to be leveling off at between 20 to 27 percent, despite strong growth after it was initially released in 2006. Microsoft does still have the advantage of having IE 7 bundled with every new computer running Windows Vista, so it will certainly become more widely used in the future, but the company has apparently decided that short term market share is more important than piracy checks.

The IE7 update includes a few other tweaks as well: the menu bar is now displayed by default, hopefully signaling the beginning of the end for the idea that menus are somehow passé in modern GUI applications. Also, the IE7 "online tour" has updated instructions, and the browser's first-run page includes a new overview of the browser and its functionality. For IT administrators, Microsoft has also released a new IE7 Administration Kit (IEAK) that includes an MSI installer for easier deployment across multiple computers.